Sacred Hoopster

‘Eleven Rings,’ by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty

In late March, apparently in order to help promote “Eleven Rings,” Phil Jackson joined Twitter with a splash. His first tweet received attention on various sports Web sites, including USA Today’s and ESPN.com, because its text read, in full, “11 champ;ipnsikp[ ringhs.” (An ad made the joke clear: he had tried to type while wearing all 11 rings.) Jackson’s fingers soon found the correct keys, and he was off and tweeting. One might have expected profound insights from Jackson, whose 11 N.B.A. rings came while leading the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s and the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2000s and 2010s. The news media had long cast him as the “Zen master,” an intellectual with an interest in Eastern thought who used Buddhism to manage the titanic egos of Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. For the wizened sage mumbling his koans, isn’t a medium limited to 140 characters ideal?

As it turns out, no. Jackson’s Twitter account has been unenlightening in every sense of the word. However, his latest book, at more than 300 pages, builds to real insights. Among other things, “Eleven Rings,” written with Hugh Delehanty (who was also a co-author on Jackson’s “Sacred Hoops”), effectively rebuts the calumny that Jackson did little more than speak confusing nothings into the ears of his supertalented players. It also dispenses with the slander that Jackson was mainly somebody who found an interesting people-management tool, and that anyone armed with it would have coached 11 championship teams had he, too, been able to put Jordan and Bryant on the floor. Instead, through candor and comprehensiveness, Jackson writes a convincing revisionist take, in which he emerges as an excellent coach: inventive with the game, savvy with the gamesmanship and, yes, brilliant with his sensational players (as though that skill were nothing; as though Millard Fillmore would have been as great a president as Lincoln had the Civil War happened on his watch).

The book is a little long — there are 11 rings to cover (13 if you count the two he won as a player for the New York Knicks) — but highly readable, in part because it is rigorously focused on Jackson’s development and then his career as a head basketball coach. Many will wish for more details about his personal life, and even the discussion of his career would have benefited from greater detail about his longtime relationship with his soon-to-be third wife, Jeanie Buss, a Lakers executive and the daughter of the late Lakers owner Jerry Buss.

It seems very likely that Jackson sold his publisher on a leadership manual — the book has the TED Talk-sounding subtitle “The Soul of Success.” There is a little management-schoolish jargon. And, of course, there is some whimsical Eastern thought, inevitably lapsing into self-parody (“Liu Bang” — the emperor who unified China — “would have made a good basketball coach,” Jackson writes). But “Eleven Rings” reflects Jackson’s polymathy. He cites the Grateful Dead and William James, Thelonious Monk and Abraham Maslow. He tells us that he deliberately touched his nemesis Pat Riley, then the Knicks coach, before a crucial playoff game in order to “count coup,” as the Lakota do. He compares his third Lakers championship season to Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel “Oblomov.” In the space of a page, he toggles from psychotherapy to Native American customs to Christianity to Buddhism and back to “two recent studies published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.”

And then there is basketball. One gets the sense that had Delehanty not stopped Jackson, the entire book would be little more than quotations from various religions’ holy scriptures, but there are also discussions of long-forgotten defensive matchups and paeans to the triangle offense. It is downright endearing — not to mention educational — to read about the full-court trap the Bulls set to contain the Phoenix Suns point guard Kevin Johnson in the 1993 finals. And the pages on basketball further give the lie to the image of Jackson as mere benevolent overseer.

As on the court, in the book the players take center stage. This makes for interesting copy (and nicely subverts the coaching-memoir genre, pointing out that nobody watches basketball for the guy wearing the suit), yet at the same time Jackson and Delehanty can’t quite bring it off. Most of the players, several of whom were interviewed for the book and speak about Jackson, are transparent cutouts. Scottie Pippen, the selfless “point forward,” is the perfect embodiment of basketball the way Jackson believes it should be played. Dennis Rodman is a man-child. John Paxson, Steve Kerr and Derek Fisher are ciphers. Shaq is a cartoon (in fairness, this may be an accurate depiction). Jordan is an impossibly deep bass voice speaking from behind a black curtain in a dark room.

One character does emerge, though, and steals the show. Kobe Bean Bryant, currently laid up with a torn Achilles’ tendon, is the most compelling character in this book, more so even than the autobiographer, more so, in fact, than most of the characters in most of the books I’ve ever read. Bryant’s brand of neediness — he must be seen as mature, which he conveys through tantrums; he requires the ball, unless not having the ball will help the team win, although having the ball will help the team win, except when it won’t — is not just idiosyncratic, it’s unique. With Bryant, you never know what he will do next. The dramas — the feud with Shaq; the rape allegation (“I had difficulty believing that Kobe was capable of committing such an act,” Jackson writes); the incessant toying with leaving the Lakers — are given their due. But so is the Bryant who took a course in advanced Italian at U.C.L.A., and who “often boasted to his teammates that he planned to be monogamous for life,” and who once interrogated his teammates one at a time as he tried to smoke out an anonymous source, and who says things like: “I saw myself as a Navy SEAL type of guy who goes in and does his job quietly. He doesn’t get the accolades that he should have gotten, but the true basketball purists know what he’s done.”

“Eleven Rings” brings a further revision to mind. Jackson’s Zen philosophy means being at peace with reality: the book’s last line states, “The soul of success is surrendering to what is.” That sort of perspective stands in stark contrast to the control-freak temperaments of every football coach to put on a headset, not to mention some of the more intense hardcourt generals, like Riley. Rather, Jackson’s Zen mind-set appears to be shared by none other than the advanced-analytics types who have taken over baseball and are now making headway in the N.B.A. After pouring countless hours into numbers and game tape, they will say only that over the long run, the statistics will be manifest on the court — probably. Or, as Jackson puts it, “When you play the game the right way, it makes sense to the players, and winning is the likely outcome.”

ELEVEN RINGS

The Soul of Success

By Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty

Illustrated. 356 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic and a co-editor of “Jewish Jocks.”

A version of this review appears in print on June 2, 2013, on Page BR47 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Sacred Hoopster. Today's Paper|Subscribe